Cool blues and bright oranges, the colors of seas and sunsets, provided moments of sumptuous splendor in Eileen Quinlan’s “The Waves,” an elegantly austere spectacle of eighteen mostly abstract photographs. The works, printed on aluminum-framed mirrors, seemed lit from within, allowing for subtle interactions between viewer and subject. Interested in the seductive power of photography, emphasizing the disruption of passive viewing – aspects which the artist has explored, through a Brechtian lens, over the course of some twenty years – Quinlan had here integrated these long-standing concerns into a fun-filled dreamscape. The concepts underlying the artist’s earlier projects seemed to have been metabolized into a set of images that were more heuristic than didactic, harnessing the medium’s capacity for luscious beauty.
The pieces exhibited here, with their uniform scale (approximately forty by thirty inches) and spacious installation, allowed for understated visual experiences, intimate and individual interactions. Quinlan seemed to explore the ways in which images resolve and cohere, using, through analog and digital processes, a variety of materials such as images found on the internet, commercial videos, expired films and images of his own naked body. . Five works, including Set of spin cycles (wedding list), 2023, from one of the artist’s new series, features dramatic stills of ridges and splashes of water taken from surf video that Quinlan rephotographed, solarized, and manipulated in Photoshop. (The artist calls his series “sets” because the word together, in scientific terms, refers to a succession of ocean waves.) Unlike earlier investigations which incorporate more referential imagery, including a group of works from 2016 which feature news photos documenting the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Paris and in Palmyra, Syria, which occurred the previous year, these pieces are more nebulous, elusive. The inversion of dark and light, echoing the interplay between positive and negative inherent in analog photography, in combination with the mirrored surface produced astonishing moments of hydrokinetic energy. Elsewhere, two cameraless images from 2023’s “Swipe Set,” shot on discarded Polaroid Type 55 large-format film, highlighted Quinlan’s ongoing experiments with chance and control (the medium is unpredictable due to its expired chemistry). The film, which Polaroid ceased production in 2008, failed to emerge from its package during the exposure period and produced purely chemical compositions full of silvery streaks, streaks and puddles, reminiscent of paintings. Color Field metallics.
Quinlan’s images stand independently as strong formal statements, but taken together they reveal that their relationship to one another is paramount. In a 2018 interview, the artist said she thinks about her work “syntactically.” Quietly evocative as an installation, this exhibition raised questions about the fleeting nature of subjective experience. In past projects, Quinlan has emphasized formal, technical, and conceptual rigor. Yet the art that resulted from this approach always felt hampered by its careful manipulation. By not making declarative statements about the state of the world in this presentation, she opened herself up to a way of creating and understanding images in which nothing is as cut and dried, or as solid, as it might have seemed so in the past. And from this amorphous richness, something quite powerful was born.
